Read Hillary Clinton’s Full Speech Accepting the Wonder Woman Award

Hillary Rodham Clinton accepts the WMC Wonder Woman Award onstage at the Women's Media Center 2017 Women's Media Awards at Capitale on October 26, 2017 in New York City.

By Cindy Ord/Getty

On her 70th birthday, Hillary Clinton was an honoree at the Women’s Media Awards, becoming the organization’s inaugural recipient of their Wonder Woman Award—and who better to fit the bill? As Women’s Media Center co-founder Jane Fonda said in her opening remarks, Clinton has for years been changing lives and ensuring that women’s rights are human rights and vice versa.

“Over the years, I’ve watched Hillary break glass ceilings and champion women and girls and fight for human rights domestically and internationally by [leading with] compassion and passion and dedication,” Fonda said. “She has accomplished so much, all in the face of extremely toxic masculinity. She gets down, but she bounces right back, and that’s never been more true than right now when the person least qualified in history to be president of the United States is president.”

Below, is the full transcript of Clinton’s speech, a rousing, 15-minute call-to-arms for equality of the sexes in the work place and on the national stage, and in the end, an insistence that we “not grow weary doing the good that we need to do.”

What a great way to celebrate your birthday. I can’t imagine any better place to be with better company than all of you, and I just have to tell you how really touched and honored I am. Thanks to the Women’s Media Center and thanks to the extraordinary women, the legendary co-founders, Gloria, Jane, Pat, and Robin Morgan, who couldn’t be with us tonight. They saw what needed to be said and done years ago, and doesn’t it seem like they were ahead of their time? And the work that lies ahead is even more important.

I want to congratulate all of the honorees. Each one of you fill me with hope for the future. And I want to thank my dear friend and former senior policy adviser Maya Harris. Thanks, also, to Julie Burton and Laurie Embrey and Janet Dewart Bell and everyone who helped make this evening possible.

And honestly, it really is exciting to receive the first Wonder Woman Award. Yes! I, um, I saw the movie. I loved the outfit. My granddaughter was really keen on Wonder Woman, so I thought maybe I could borrow something from her for the night. It didn’t quite work for me, but I will say that this award means a lot to me because as a little girl, and then as a young woman, and then as a slightly older woman, I always wondered when Wonder Woman would have her time, and now that has happened.

Now, as hard as it is to believe, there is still a lot of work to be done, isn’t there? Last year, when I was pursuing the presidency, I ran into people, both women and men who thought sexism and the struggle for women’s equality was so over—a thing of the past, ancient history. But what a difference a year makes. The past 12 months have proven in so many ways that the struggle is just as urgent and vital as ever, and that means the work of the Women’s Media Center is, as well.

You know, back in the 1972 presidential election, the reporters who would travel with candidates were called the boys on the bus, remember that? And then in 2016, people were saying, “Well, these are the girls on the plane.” So, yes, there’s been some progress—people didn’t travel on buses as much. I just wanted to give a few comments because, clearly, some of the best, smartest, bravest reporting is coming from women today. But women still have fewer bylines, are less likely to be quoted in stories, and when it comes to covering sexual assault, reproductive rights, or any other issue, that’s a problem.

We’ve all felt the exasperation, yelling at the TV, of turning on cable news to see a panel of men discussing equal pay or women’s health. It’s just inexcusable. When will the media recognize we are half of the population, and when our voices are absent, you are not telling the whole story? I recently had dinner with a group of women writers and reporters, and they were telling me about the threats and the online harassment they experience every day. I thought it was just me! And so listening to them as they try to write stories, as they push back on counter-narratives and the grief they take, this demonstrated so clearly that women in media, or likely any industry or walk of life, face barriers at work.

Now, we learned a lot in just the past several months about the culture of sexism that permeated Fox News thanks to women who worked there speaking out. That is not the only media company where discrimination runs rampant. I was fascinated, if you haven’t seen it, by a study published this week in the Harvard Business Review trying to understand what is it that holds women back in various work settings. And so they took one company where women were underrepresented in upper management—they had a lot of companies to choose from. And they put sensors on women and men and studied where they went, who they met with, and how often they spoke up in meetings. Guess what? It turned out that the work comparisons of these men and women were almost identical. It wasn’t women’s actions—you know all these stories you hear about, you know, they don’t socialize enough, they don’t seek advice enough, they don’t want mentors enough—we’ve heard all that. But this real-world, real-time study showed that it wasn’t women’s actions that were holding them back, it was bias. It was expectations that were so deeply embedded in how women are viewed and treated that a lot of you, men and women alike, are not even aware of them. That’s called implicit bias.

Now, the Women’s Media Center is exposing bias like that through projects such as the annual awards on the status of women in the media, and working to confront it head-on. Understanding that when diverse perspectives are not represented, that doesn’t hurt just individual women, it hurts our public discourse. Your original content is a model of the kind of rational reporting that’s rooted in evidence that I’d like to see a lot more of across our media. Because we, my friends, are in the midst of an all-out assault on truth. So the Women’s Media Center’s database of women experts on every topic from climate change to technology has never been more important because despite what some try to tell us, there is no such thing as an alternative fact. When leaders deny things, we can see with our own eyes—like, for example, the size of the crowd at an inauguration. That is not only frustrating, it is subversive to democracy, and when they refuse to accept science or evidence, that has real-world consequences.

Now, we were reminded of that just last week when a pink memo from the Trump administration described plans to totally gut evidence-based sex education and teen pregnancy prevention programs, wipe out Title X and USAID family planning, and even end the Let Girls Learn initiative started by Michelle Obama. This isn’t just cruel and harmful to women and girls and their families. It flies in the face of evidence, facts, and reason. Studies actually show that access to family planning is critical not only for women’s health but to their economic advancement, and empowering women makes entire countries more peaceful, prosperous, and secure.

And so, here in America, thanks to decades of hard work by some of you on this stage and in this audience and investment in prevention, we are at a 30-year low for unintended pregnancies, a 40-year low in teen pregnancy, and the lowest abortion rates since Roe v. Wade. Why, why did we not build on what works? Well, you know why. There are ideological, religious, commercial, partisan agendas that are calling for the abandonment of what works and we’ve got to tell that story, and we have to fight at every turn to try to protect and persevere what works. And the media must play a critical role. By transforming media, Women’s Media Center transforms our culture, as well.

And yes, little girls now have new role models like Wonder Women. I had a hunch that I would like that movie—a strong woman who tuned out the naysayers and helped save the world from a massive international disaster. That’s right up my alley . . . But this is about more than just making better or representative movies, it’s about the need for better representation of women in all walks of life. You cannot be what you cannot see. We’ve all heard that. I am exhibit A of the fact that there are times when progress can feel like it’s two steps forward, one step back. But for years, Women’s Media Center has been helping to shine a light on subjects that were once swept under the rug completely: sexual harassment and assault, violence against women in conflict zones.

And women are now speaking out, standing with you for equality and progress through Women’s March and the tens of thousands of the candidates who have signed up to run for office since the 2016 election. More and more women are sharing their experiences like Tarana Burke, the activist who started the #MeToo movement more than a decade ago. We have a term for it, which I love: empowerment through empathy. I think more empathy is exactly what we need right now. In my book, What Happened, I called for radical empathy. People have got to start listening to one another and not treating each other as though we were somehow off limits because we have different skin color or a different religion or sexual orientation or whatever it might be.

You know, nearly 50 years ago, Robin Morgan reminded us that sisterhood is powerful. I’ve seen that in my own life with so many friends and supporters, colleagues, comrades who have stood with me in good times and difficult ones, and that’s really what the center is trying to do: build a global sisterhood of women and men who are looking out for each other, lifting each other up, and telling those stories.

So I’m very grateful for this award. And I thank you for the work that the Center does and that you are supporting. And I also just want to end with this: thank you for refusing to grow weary or be silenced. Look, I fought to be here, and I knew there were a lot of folks telling me to just shut up and sit down and never say another word, and I thought to myself, well, what is it they’re so afraid of hearing? But I don’t intend to be silenced, and I know none of you do either. The world has never needed your voices more, never needed the vision of fairness and quality and opportunity that the Center represents more than it ever has today.

So on behalf of the tens of millions of Wonder Women out there who get up every day and often against seemingly insurmountable odds, stand up for what they care about, what they love, what they are: dignity, freedom. I accept this award and ask you do not grow weary doing the good that we need to do. Thank you all.

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